Change is gonna come

The program director’s job is one of the toughest in radio. I give regular thanks that it is Jackie Sauter's, not mine. At the core of the job is the mandate to keep the sound fresh, to find voices both diverse and comprehensive, to balance the need for information with the need for entertainment, and to have a global view of everything that goes out over our air. It requires an exquisitely tuned ear, telepathic connection to the audience, a thorough understanding of mission, and a bushel basketful of tact and sensitivity. The test of these qualities comes at times of trepidation and excitement, at times of change, like now.

Beginning Monday, February 5, NCPR will be refreshing its weekday lineup with a number of new programs. At 2 pm weekdays, Dick Gordon, the much-missed former host of The Connection will return to NCPR with his new program, The Story, which looks at the world through the real-life experiences of ordinary people, with the aid of the innovative Public Insight Journalism service. At 1 pm on Friday, we will introduce a variety of limited series and specials, beginning with Radio Lab, the imaginative science series from WNYC. Open Source, formerly heard once a week and a day late, Wednesday at 2 pm, will now be carried live and in full Monday-Thursday at 7 pm. The program offers analysis, commentary and features, developed through a unique network of bloggers and citizen journalists, and is hosted by the peerless Chris Lydon.

To accommodate these additions, weekday broadcast of The World and Performance Today will be moved back one hour, to 8 pm and 9 pm respectively. The Folk Show will also move, from 8 pm to 7 pm on Friday. Please give these new programs an advance peek at their websites above and, as always, let us know what you think about these or any of our programs. Write jackie@ncpr.org.

Postmodern Situation Room

My brain, alas, is slightly pre-postmodern, and discombobulates when frames of reference become too tightly intertwined. Take the fake news—The Daily Show from Tuesday--CSPAN shows a congressman objecting to calling a group of senior Bush advisors “the Vulcans” because, given what he sees as their truculence and deficiency in logic, they should instead be called “the Klingons.” News of a sort. The Daily Show picks it up and calls the nearest thing to a Vulcan, Spock portrayer Leonard Nimoy, for comment. Another Trek veteran, George Takei interrupts. So we have policy examined via fantasy, reported as news, rendered as satire, given context by actors reprising their fantasy roles. Small wonder that modern newsrooms all appear to be modeled on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (the set of the bridge, that is). In the next half hour we find that fake conservative talk host Stephen Colbert will have real conservative talk host Bill O’Reilly (who was the mold from which Colbert was struck) as his guest, and that Colbert will also appear on O’Reilly’s show. A double-dittoheader.

Looking for relief from the media mirrorball, I fire up my office radio today for On Point, only to find an hour-long look at anti-terrorism policy as colored by the Fox thriller series, 24. The superhuman antics of Agent Jack Bauer are contrasted with actual ops, and an alarming number of real anti-terrorism types declare their fandom—Yikes!

Mostly I like to think “What is reality?” is a rhetorical question. But apparently, this is a fantasy I can no longer afford. The “point of contemplation” in my yoga class this week concerned how the body can experience that which has never happened to it, solely through the impact of our thinking. In a sense we become, therefore, what we watch. At the moment, I am sore all over.

Let's meet on it

I write in haste today because, as it sometimes happens, I have spent most of the day--and the week, and large portions of my adult life--in meetings. Unfortunately, they were not meetings about what to write in my newsletter article. But then, meetings on that topic rarely go anywhere.

It is mostly in science fiction that things get done without the aid of meetings. The steel-jawed superhero perceives the need, possesses the means, and executes the necessary with laser dispatch. The rest of us have meetings. While nothing happens in them, nothing happens without them. Long-range planning, short-term planning, assessment, review, pre-meeting meetings, post-meeting appreciations. We have meetings solely to nominate those who will attend future meetings, and further meetings to ratify the nominations.

In the present moment, all one can do is breathe, refrain from strangling the breath from others, and await adjournment. All the action bullets pertain to the future, what little of it remains between scheduled meetings. From the outside the process is indistinguishable from other primate grooming behavior--hence the term nit-picking. Well--we tend to wear clothing, too. But the result is the same. By the end of the process, by some means not altogether clear, it is decided who gets the bananas and who gets the peels. New business? Do I hear a motion to adjourn?

You too

Much has been made of Time magazine’s person of the year selection for 2006—You—as in you, the citizen journalist, blogger, YouTuber, myspacer, etc. The accompanying article describes the selection as helping to deconstruct the “Great Man” theory of history, and to recognize the increasing democratization of media. Never mind that Time has been dining out on the “Great Man” theory since 1927 with this very feature, and that the ownership and control of mass media continues to consolidate toward the fortunate and unaccountable few, despite the explosion of new media. As one of Time’s “yous,” I appreciate the value of the growing capability to communicate to audiences without mediation. Old wisdom said “Freedom of the press belongs to them that own one.” In the new paradigm we all—potentially—own one. And that is big news.

What we don’t each own, however, is an audience. My home video—yawn; Osama’s home video—above-the-fold news. The large impact made in 2006 by citizen journalism, the “macaca” video and similar bits, comes when they are echoed in the larger media that has a mass following of eyes and ears. And that media world is an exclusive and ever-shrinking club. For them, new media is a new source of sources. While that has value in itself, it is not the Revolution. New media looks to me more like the Gold Rush, where everybody and his brother set out to stake a claim and started panning streams in the wilderness. A few got rich, most went home, and the big mining companies bought up everything in sight. The $1.6 billion Google gobble of YouTube is a case in point.